Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to tackle high rates of chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the U.
S. Department of Health and Human Services. They’re goals that many in the public health world find themselves agreeing with — despite fearing what else the infamous anti-vaccine activist may do in the post.
Just don’t suggest that he tackle those goals with medications like Ozempic. “They’re counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs,” Kennedy said in an appearance with Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld that he posted to Instagram last month, concluding that Ozempic, a wildly popular medicine approved to treat type 2 diabetes and used off-label for weight loss, is not going to “Make America Healthy Again.” Kennedy claimed that Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, doesn’t market the medicine in its home country of Denmark, where “they do not recommend it for diabetes or obesity; they recommend dietary and behavioral changes.
” In fact, Denmark does use Ozempic, so much so that the Danish Medicines Agency said in May that it would restrict its use until after people had tried less expensive medications to treat diabetes. Instead of a shift to forego medication in favor of lifestyle changes, as Kennedy suggested, it was a cost-cutting move, since more than 100,000 people had received the drug or others in its class, known as GLP-1 receptor agonists. Denmark also uses O.
